Re: Slow copy

[Ronny Aasen <list@datapart-as.no>]

On Thu, 2005-12-15 at 12:42 +0000, Graham Smith wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> This is perhaps one of the stranger questions to be asked but I'm looking for 
> a utility that will copy a file slowly.
> 
> Part of my ad hoc backup system is to copy the nightly backup tar file from 
> our production machine onto another machine. The problem is that the 
> production machine is not exactly what you would call high performance and 
> the file copy basically causes everything else to grind to a halt. It doesn't 
> matter to me that the copy is done in 5 minutes or 50 minutes what matters is 
> that it doesn't kill the server for 5 minutes a day.
> 
> What I am basically looking for is a version of cp with a max copy rate 
> argument. I would write my own but I can't believe that I'm the only one who 
> has ever wanted this feature so I suspect there is one already in existence.
> 

if you do your copy with rsync, you can use the --bwlimit argument.
if you do your tar's with --rsyncable you would not have to transfer the
whole tar file each time either, only the differences. 

if you do not use rsync you can throttle your aplication with trickle or
shaperd

with regards
Ronny Aasen